28 11/09
18:27

Star Wars in a notebook

Tags: , , , | Categories: digital media, DIY

Hi,
fan productions can appeared in different ways, sometimes these productions are completely independent and others are encouraged by the owners of a particular media commodity, nevertheless, often, fan productions kindly expand the fictional world of a media product by appropriation of its narrative.

Fans are all around the world and it is usual to find contests of fan media productions held by the mass media companies with participants from different countries. Lucas Films and Atoms Films support a yearly Star Wars fan video competition with different categories and prizes, it is called Star Wars Challenge. In the 2009 competition, for the first time a Latin American won in a category. The winner in the category of Best Animated Movie was Óscar Triana, a Colombian animator.

Star Wars in a Notebook has a hand-draw, and cut and paste style. And in spite of its neat animation it keeps the DIY visual style of fan video productions. It was reported by UN Periodico at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (in Spanish). And below you can enjoy this 3 minutes animation piece.

Here can also be watched the winners of each category as well as the firsts nominated for the 2010 competition.

10 09/09
21:31

Machinima: Leonardo LABS Node 284

HI, machinima goes on finding its way into the academia. My little contribution has been added to the Leonardo’s thesis abstract service (LABS). Now in Leonardo On-line, my work can be consulted for anyone interested in the topic. My thesis is identified by the node 284, here its link.

Movement under thousand eyes

Movement under thousand eyes

As any scientific work, mine is open and free, therefore, today I share and publish an electronic version to anyone who wants to read the entire document, here the pdf. I hope to receive soon your critical comments.


  1. Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo. Movement under thousand eyes. 2009. Hochschule Bremerhaven and Universität Bremen. Germany.

13 07/09
16:19

Machinima movie: 1k Project II (2006)

Swarms, replicas, machinima
The screen is filled by a yellow sport car running across town on a sunny day. Soon, a swarm of a thousand replicas of the yellow car are running, smashing, and crashing against the trees, walls, and pavement of the town. No window is opened, no one in the town dares to see what happens outside. The furious cars jump over bridges, over roofs, over street lights, and frenetically descend into a perfectly clean highway. Nothing stops the riot nor the architecture nor its own chaotic behaviour. To the repetitive rhythm of a popular electronic song, a yellow moving stain covers the town. A plastic beach appears on the horizon just one last bridge. The camera soars over the roofs and enters a tunnel to engage in the madness. Hysterically, it traverses a rain of yellow dots to fiercely collide against a pixellated ocean. The flat image of a shark indicates that the movie has ended.

The 1K Project II from BlackShark on Vimeo.

Filmographic information. Ref: a.MAC 2006-05
Original title: 1K Project II Length: 3:06
Country of origin: n/a Director(s): BlackShark
Year of release: 2006 Game engine: Trackmania Sunrise®
Genre: Music video (Mashup)

18 05/09
19:38

Star Wars fan videos

HI,
one part of my recent thesis discusses fan and amateur video productions in the context of machinima and DIY media. Star Wars holds a large fan community all around the word, only comparable to trekkies, that has made it to achieve its status as cult film. These are very active communities whose members usually get involved in organising festivals and conventions, and in publishing fanzines and other forms of DIY media.

Fans, independent of the cult media, appropriate the original media content to extend its diegetic world. These activities can be read as either participatory or resistant towards the media. The story lines, characters, and aesthetics of the media cult are unfolded in order to fill gaps, or to accommodate them to personal, political, and social issues. In all cases, fan’s productions are deviations of the cult media (film, TV series, video game, and pop bands) that the producers do not support officially, but that in many cases they encourage as long as these productions increase the popularity of their cultural text.

The access to nearly inexpensive tools for media production has brought a proliferation of these fan’s (di,-sub-, and per-) versions with a decent and even high quality. Fanzines, fanart, music videos, mash-ups, disguises, parallel narrations, mods, machinimas, and online forums are part of a huge realm in media production that currently is garnering as much attention as the original productions in the Internet.

Recently, I found via Wired the following videos by Mike Horn, an enthusiast of Star Wars. His DIY productions combine the amateurish style of camcorder video with CG animations. He places the universe of Star Wars in contact with San Francisco and in one of the videos in narrative collision with Star Trek.



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